<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The Cumaean Sibyl by lejf</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23627035">The Cumaean Sibyl</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf'>lejf</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Resurrection?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:14:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,873</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23627035</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry found that coming back to life didn't hurt as much as dying.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter/Tom Riddle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Some edits to our canon timeline. Percy is not the Head of Sports and Shacklebolt is not current Minister.</p><p>remember when i said i wouldn’t write any more for these two? i'm a liar ¯\(ツ)/¯</p>
    </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>“I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said, <i>Sibyl, what do you want?</i> she replied <i>I want to die.</i>” - translated, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p2"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry had a headache building behind his eyes. “A dead body isn’t going to <em>get up</em> and leave,” he said, for the millionth time. Followed by, “Dumbledore died in 1997.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“But what if he’s alive?" </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">This was one of his newer Aurors, shiny-eyed and shying the edge of hopeful. Harry sighed and looked up. He’d just come back at his desk after a thorough round of debriefing. There was a ripple of echoed sentiment around the room, where others were pretending not to be listening for his response but were wishing for the same thing. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">In his final year, when he'd been hunting for horcruxes, Harry had been haunted by the same thought. Maybe Dumbledore was alive. But Harry had been desperate, then. He’d been stressed and unbelievably desperate. With the distance of time, the wound had closed and understanding had healed it over. Dumbledore died at the hand of one of his friends to protect a student and that was the worthiest death of a wizard whose greatest legacy was Hogwarts.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Robbins. You were three years beneath me, right? In Hufflepuff?” Robbins nodded fervently. That meant he was old enough to have remembered Dumbledore’s nature. “If he could climb from his grave, he would’ve been standing in front of Hogwarts’ gates when Voldemort came. But he didn’t, because he passed away, and we have to accept that. This is a <em>grave robbery</em>. As Aurors, we should always assume the worst. Someone with an agenda wants to disgrace him.“ Just Voldemort had done, cracking open his tomb to take the Elder Wand. “They didn’t just want the wands—they wanted to take everything. That power and mindset is more dangerous than anything, and that’s why we <em>have</em> to find the culprit.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The fact of the matter was deceptively simple: Dumbledore’s dead body was missing.</span>
</p><p class="p3"> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The owl had come in today from McGonagall to Robards with only preliminary, shocked information. A student reported around noon that the White Tomb was standing open. The only lead so far was the time frame. It must have happened earlier that morning because Hagrid hadn’t seen anything amiss in his evening rounds the previous day. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The lines cut into the tomb had been perfectly straight. It was anything but natural.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry was well into his second firewhiskey.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Merlin, Harry, leave some for me, won’t you?” Ron practically fell into the chair beside him with a drink ordered from Tom, the barkeep, faithfully working in the Leaky as ever. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">No cheers this week. They both just knocked back and let the liquid burn down their throats. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You won’t believe how many theories I ran into the ground today,” Harry said, wiping his mouth. “Did Dumbledore become a ghost? Is Dumbledore still alive? Was it a prankster? Was it some Slytherin kid? How do people think the tomb’s just a <em>rock</em>? It’s a part of Hogwarts and its <em>wards</em>. That’s like saying any random prat can destroy the Great Hall.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Hope you didn’t chew them out,” Ron said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“‘Course not,” Harry said. "I leave all the moaning and groaning for you to hear.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Ron pulled a disgusted face. So did Harry. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Hermione settled into the seat beside them not long after. She grabbed the drink right out of Ron’s hands. They both watched her down a frankly impressive amount of firewhiskey before she set it down with a deep breath and then conjured a sheaf of paper from her robes. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Friday nights are no work!” Ron exclaimed. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Last month we worked on the rock giant thing,” Harry pointed out, watching Hermione rife through the papers. Ron’s face fell. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It’s not like we’ll have this weekend off,” Hermione interrupted, brushing a stray curl of hair out from her face. “This is important. Besides, you two’ll be owlled tomorrow morning with a copy. You might as well get a head start. We just went through the first round of interviewing and investigating at Hogwarts. Some students said that they’d seen people down at the Lake, some said that they’d heard noises in the Forest, some said they’d seen Dumbledore eating in the Great Hall. We haven’t quite sifted out rabble from good witness accounts yet.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said, “Hey, Hermione, do you remember— there was that case last year— no, never mind, you weren’t on that one. Ron was,” he said, rubbing at his forehead, an old habit with the scar. “It was a grave-robbing thing too where the bodies were taken. But they were just trying to use it for Inferi, and they didn’t even succeed.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Mate, I thought we agreed not to talk about that one,” Ron said, grimacing. The exploded spell had pulled tendons, innards, and sinew out of people like spooling thread. Ron had been unlucky enough to have been one of the many Aurors caught by it and watched his ribs gush out from his chest. “Merlin knows how we got put back together at Mungo’s.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Didn’t they say they had a breakthrough with healing technique last year?” Harry said. Ron shrugged, and went to order another round of acid-spirit for them to avoid talking about it. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No one would use <em>Dumbledore's</em> body for Inferi,” Hermione said. She smoothed out a scribbled record of all student testimonies, time-stamped. “Inferi are incapable of magic. They have no will and no mind, so it defeats the advantage of taking Dumbledore instead of anyone else. The only reason someone’d want to do that is if they wanted to prove wastefulness. Disgrace him, or people like him.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Who’d have such a vendetta against Dumbledore?” Harry said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Ron returned. “Dunno. Grindelwald?” he said, and handed them their drinks before sliding into his seat beside Hermione. “Here.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Grindelwald’s dead," Harry said, tiredly. “I reported that after Voldemort, didn’t I? He got killed in Nuremgard.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Well, maybe his body’s up and gone too.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I think I might look into that,” Hermione said. “I don’t actually know where he was buried— did he have any living family yet? It’s unlikely to be a lead, but you never know.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">After a moment, Harry said, “I want to go to check the Forest. Even if the students didn’t hear something there, the centaurs must’ve seen something. How about the wards around Hogwarts? Are we narrowing it down to a student?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Not yet. The wards mostly keep out Dark magic and Muggles, and the tomb’s not exactly in the castle itself, so we’re keeping options open.” Hermione said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Maybe it’s a teacher," Ron said. “Hey, about the wards— how about ex-Hogwarts students? Maybe you should go talk to Lucius so we can get an ear into anti-Ministry stuff.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Merlin,” Harry muttered, imagining Lucius’ pinched expression if Harry turned up at his Manor. “You do that.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’d rather die. You were the one who testified for him–”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“What do you mean? So did you!”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah, but do you think he really cared if I did?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“A lot of people testified for Lucius,” Hermione said. As a long-suffering victim of his son, even she’d spoken at his war-crime trial. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Except the Wizengamot was sucking on Harry’s <em>toes</em>,” Ron said. Harry nearly spat into his drink. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Look–“ It was true that the Wizengamot had taken his word very seriously in the direct aftermath of the war. “–I don’t want to talk to Lucius. Don’t you think it makes it worse that he doesn’t know how to <em>not</em> be a ponce? He knows he doesn’t have the right to be a posh bastard anymore, but the stick’s built <em>into</em> his arse.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Hermione sighed loudly to get their attention. “I’ll talk to Narcissa. She had tea with me last month.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Ron’s head whipped around. Harry was similarly agape. They hadn’t exactly been in regular touch with the Malfoys. Ron said, “You did what? Why didn’t you tell me?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“She was applying for a Ministry position. I interviewed her.” Her gaze went flinty. “Why would I tell you that anyway? I thought we didn’t discuss work on Fridays.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Ron’s responding groan of dismay was full-body. </span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry woke up with a hangover and more than one owl tapping on his window. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The treats and water he always left on the sill were being politely ravaged when he sank into his armchair and pored over his letters, nursing a hot cup of tea and basking in a sun ray. It was Saturday. He lived in his own stereotypical bachelor pad in the middle of Muggle London, and, much to the ire of magical reporters and similar ilk, it had been spelled up and down by Lee Jordan’s now-wife, a particularly talented Unspeakable who had made the address hidden to all yet discoverable by owls. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">With direct concealment covered, the indirectness of its anonymity was tied up in its obscure paper trail that no wizard would think to follow; he’d called in a favour to Dudley to purchase it for him, a completely ordinary Muggle property, and simply made private readjustments. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The largest envelope brought in by the owls was a folder of the multiple interview transcripts of staff and students on Hogwarts grounds. It was prefaced with images of the White Tomb itself and its scrubber was adjustable along the bottom. Robards had attached a short memoencouraging him to lead his team to investigate, but reassuring him that others were also on the case, and that all findings needed to be compiled at the end of the work week so they could be included in the brief on Friday for stricter roles to be designated. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry briefly scanned through the rest of his mail. He wasn’t subscribed to the Wizarding Weekly or any popular newspapers. They had spares in the break room at the office. He had a letter from Neville, who was working as the Herbology professor at Hogwarts—unsurprising, given that Harry would probably find his testimony in the folder and would probably see him later today when he went to Hogwarts; one from Seamus, who worked in the Sports department of the Ministry and with whom Harry was on regular speaking terms; one from Dudley, who’d just gotten engaged and a new job as a data scientist and swearing that he’d been seeing magic at his workplace; one from one of his Aurors asking for leave because his grandmother had fallen ill; and one signed by multiple Weasleys, asking him over for dinner.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">After penning replies to all of them, finishing up the transcripts—annotating them, marking which comments should go under more inspection and re-interviewing, owling orders to his senior team members, and getting properly dressed, he left for Hogwarts. McGonagall must’ve known he arrived because he found her waiting for him at the front gates. Pleasantries aside, he told her that he would be taking some of Hagrid’s time to briefly scout the Forest, and that the rest of his team would be coming in the afternoon to comb over the original testimonies more closely. He asked her if she had any updates on the wards. She said that there had been a minor fluctuation two days prior to the incident. Harry told her that his team would take her statement and details on that in the afternoon, and then he went to find Hagrid. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">As expected, Hagrid was down in the Groundskeeping shed. His greeting was mostly jovial, circumstances aside, and offered Harry scones while he updated Harry that he’d been allowed back inside the Forest in the wake of the Battle of Hogwarts. But relations were still tentative. It was probably better if Harry went on his own. Harry was stronger and more capable than Hagrid now—he would be fine. The fewer wizards trespassing on the centaurs’ territory, the better. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">So Harry went alone. He put his wand away to appear visibly unarmed and wandered into the Forest at random, until the sunlight filtered out due to the thickness of the canopy and he deemed himself deep enough in the trees. Then, he waited; he sat politely at a the base of a tree and simply breathed the air, letting his thoughts simmer. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">They materialised slowly, the outlines of them, glimmering eyes, behind broad leaves and thick trunks. He could see the shadows of bows and swaying tails. He was not afraid—confident that he would be safe—but the tension twisted heavily in the air—he was an intruder here.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Harry Potter,” someone said, but Harry could not locate the speaker. “Your <em>kind</em> has brought a curse upon the land.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry knew better to ask what the curse was. He wouldn’t get a straight answer from them. He took a deep breath and said, “I know. I’m sorry. I’m trying to find it now to stop it, but I need your help.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The speaker’s voice went very cold. “The stars have spoken. There <em>is</em> no light, for magic and beings and beasts alike.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“What did you see?” Harry said. Dread pooled in his gut. “Who broke into Dumbledore’s tomb?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“The end is here, Harry Potter,” the trees whispered, and then they were gone.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry liked Robards. Robards was a well-respected wizard and he had a talent at organisation and delegation that Harry had never quite gotten the hang of. Honestly, Harry preferred Robards in the Head Auror position; this way Harry was afforded a degree of manoeuvrability in this own actions and a lot more time physically out on the field. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Robards was in his office, sitting at his oaken desk, when Harry knocked and let himself in. “Hey,” Harry said. “Is there any way you could authorise me to get in touch with the Divination department?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Thee stack of papers on Robards’ desk really made Harry feel grateful. “You know that’s under the Mysteries’ division,” Robards said, not looking up. “What do you want with Unspeakables?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry sat down opposite his desk. He had a folder from his team when they’d gone in to speak to McGonagall earlier, and handed that over. “I visited some centaurs today and while they’re usually— you know— I’ve never heard them <em>this</em> foreboding. It’d just do me some peace of mind to check in on our seers, see if they’re saying anything.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“The problem with Divination is that they’re always giving doomsday prophecies, and they’re not usually right,” Robards said, with a sigh. “It’s easy to look at them in hindsight or to adjust the circumstances to fit them. But, if you want to look into it, I can give you a go ahead.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry felt a rush of relief. "You’re the best. Thanks.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Robards picked up his wand and a small intricate mark appeared on Harry’s hand. “You know what to do.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah, got it,” Harry said, standing. He paused. “Are there any other big cases I need to look at right now? Or small ones? No one takes Dumbledore’s body without planning anything else.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">There was a huge map of Great Britain on Robard’s wall filled with lights that flickered occasionally. Robards looked up at it. There were at least a three hundred. He pointed at one. Though, to Harry, it could have been any of ten that were also in the general vicinity. “Robbery at wandpoint.“ His hand shifted fractionally. “Domestic violence.” And again. “Illegal parts smuggling. There are a lot of things, and after I finish reading everything that’s sent in today, I’m going to pick my brain over if any of them can be related. I’ll call for you when I do. You okay with me taking your evening?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It’s not like I have a girlfriend or anything that’d want my Saturday dinner,” Harry said. “How’s your wife?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I think the little me might come any day,” Robards said. His whole face crinkled into a smile. In the wake of Voldemort’s death, most people were settling down and having children, but Harry was comfortable enough on his own. He had a few more years to ride the peacetime before opening that chapter of his life. He was sure he’d meet the right person.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He took the elevator down to the Department of Mysteries with Robard’s mark granting him access in the elevator to the lower floor, and ran into an Unspeakable in the main lobby. Harry asked if they were willing to share any recent prophecies. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Later, he found a memo on his desk. It was blood-sealed, so Harry had to prick his finger to open it. He recognised Robards writing. <em>The big case is one I need your help to investigate. It’s relevant to the flooding two years ago</em>, it said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1"><em>I’ve begun to suspect that there is some form of ring where common Muggles are taken either to perform certain services or provide life force. I have reason to believe that this began shortly after Dumbledore’s death in ’97, is the source behind St. Mungo’s successes, and is operating under the full knowledge of at least one Department Head in this Ministry.</em> </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The Unspeakable had looked down, twisted his lips into a frown, and said that none of the Diviners had been Looking in the past year. When Harry heard the time frame, he was disheartened, but still, he asked why. The Unspeakable said that there had been something out there looking back, something smiling and watching in every scrying glass and orb.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The next morning, Hermione wrote to him. Grindelwald’s body is missing from his grave. Harry scrunched up the letter and sat in his armchair and tried not to panic. These events were all related, but how? He refused to believe that things of such disastrous importance were occurring independently, but he failed to see the link. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He wrote a reply, <em>Check Voldemort, he’s the next in the list of powerful dead</em> and realised that he didn’t actually know where Voldemort was buried. In all the chaos, saving who was still alive and attending funerals of people he’d cared about had taken the priority. Had Voldemort even been buried? Harry could not dredge up any memory of Voldemort’s body, nor could he recall anyone who would’ve cared enough to have buried him. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He got up, tried to make his tea and ended up spilling boiling water everywhere. Scalding water dripped onto the floor from the counter and he lost his last shred of composure. “<em>Fuck!”</em> He yelled, just to get it out, and slammed his fist on the countertop. “Fuck, fuck, <em>fuck!</em>”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It was all going to shit. He could feel it, looming, right <em>there</em>, some<em>thing</em>—so <em>close</em>— and yet he didn’t know what it was at <em>all</em>.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Robards had given him a location and very specific instructions not to attempt to stop any kidnappings. Gathering evidence was the priority for blowing this whole thing out of the water, and Harry had certainly done enough charging in head-first in his youth, so he was determined to work according to plan. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">After he’d calmed down enough that morning, he’d decided on what he would do: help Robards with the Muggle-smuggling ring. The other Aurors, who were all very capable in their own right, were investigating Dumbledore’s disappearance. This was a task that he alone could do. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The Muggle street was surprisingly empty for a Sunday afternoon. Harry was dressed in Muggle clothing — which, unlike other wizards, he owned — and had styled his hair differently, taken off his glasses and charmed his eyesight instead, and carried a magical camera with him. Robards had said that the hit was for homeless Muggles in this general vicinity. All Harry needed to do was find a homeless Muggle and then tail him for maybe a week or so. He had his Invisibility Cloak with him too, which made the whole thing quite easy. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Suddenly, his wand vibrated.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry had a landline phone in his home, but if he wasn’t able to answer it, it would alert his wand by means of magic. Harry cursed and looked around for a phone booth. If they were trying to call him in the middle of the day, it was probably urgent. He was fortunate that there was one nearby. Glancing around and checking that there was still no one on the street, he stepped inside, quietly spelled the phone booth, and picked it up to answer.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Harry,” Dudley Dursley said, on the other side of the line. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’m in the middle of something,” Harry said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No, no, please. It’s my parents– I know you hate them— but they’re missing.” Harry realised his cousin’s voice was shaking. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Shit,” Harry said. Another thing in a long list of things going wrong, too close in proximity to be ignored. “Look, Dudley, I’m sorry to hear that, but it probably isn’t something that I–“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“People’ve been looking for you,“ Dudley said quickly, and Harry’s blood went cold. “They’ve been coming and asking my parents about you, and now they’re missing.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Who’s been looking for me? What did you <em>tell them?!</em>” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Nothing! Look– my mom and dad don’t— they don’t <em>care</em> and they don’t <em>want</em> to know what you’re doing but they’re <em>gone</em> and it’s because they <em>couldn’t</em> answer questions about you!” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry took a deep breath. He needed to compose himself. He was on a case right now. He couldn’t deal with this at the moment. It’d have to wait until after. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You hate them,” Dudley said, “and I know that, but if you’re responsible— if I’m going to be next—”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Dudley–“ Harry said, and then there was a sound like a thunderclap and the booth exploded. Instantly there was only blinding searing pain like his whole chest was on fire. His legs buckled, and he tried to hold on to stay upright, but his fingers had no strength, and he crumpled to the ground, screaming, screaming more than he’d ever screamed, like his throat had gotten ripped out and he couldn’t even see anything because it hurt so damn much. There was blood everywhere. It was all-encompassing agony—his vision crowded with black static and he was thoughtless; a voice was shouting tinnily on the phone; the glass of the booth had shattered everywhere and it was glistening and in his mouth and opening cuts all over his skin and even then, he couldn’t stop screaming and wailing himself raw and shaking.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">In every building, in every window, there was an impassive face watching him. Harry’s scream became breathless and noiseless, and he couldn’t reach down to his chest where the front was wet and bloody where his ribs had shattered and fatally severed his arteries. His lungs were flooding with blood and his heart was frantically pumping and exacerbating the haemorrhage by the shockwave tissue collapse caused by the instantaneous wound cavity and the fan of shrapnel bone. His spine had been struck at an angle for the exit wound out his back and the tissue under his right shoulder blade had sprayed onto the ground behind him. He lost consciousness within seconds, and died before the minute was up.</span>
</p><p class="p3"> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Hermione Granger was known for a particular brand of vengeance and determination. After the war, she had returned to Hogwarts on her own to finish her N.E.W.T.s (despite being unable to convince Harry and Ron to do the same), and it wasn’t just because of her respect for education. She needed to be taken seriously and knew that she would need every ounce of qualified backing to earn the respect of the Wizarding world. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Ron and Harry didn’t share that problem. Harry was the Boy Who Lived—the chosen one, and the saviour of the Wizarding world. He didn’t need to demand respect. He already had it. Ron was a pureblood and Harry’s right hand, with a family consisting of sibling that either worked admirably with dragons overseas or ran a successful business or played as an astounding Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">And, notably, they were both <em>men</em>. Women in the Wizarding world were not generally considered encouraged to rise. To become something that was not a housewife was regarded as beyond the norm, and even vaguely distasteful, if you asked certain members of the population. McGonagall was acceptable because she was <em>teaching</em>, and in that sense she still ‘nurtured the younger generation’ as a woman should. Ginny was not. Hermione heard her described most often as hot-headed and fiery—Harry’s words, among others—and <em>that</em> became her defining trait. Harry liked that sort of thing. That was, Hermione suspected, why they had eventually separated, because it was problematic to desire someone for something they were not.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">But women were often put into a box and dismissed. Luna became a Magizoologist because regular wizards found her oddities annoying rather than functional. Fleur, after marrying Bill, had not worked again, despite being a top student at Beauxbatons. Neither had Katie Bell, after she married. Parvati Patil tried to go into work as a Seer — because that was one of the occupation that women were suited for — but the pay was virtually nonexistent. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">People often asked Hermione when she was getting married, or if any man had caught her eye. They did not ask her how much she enjoyed her position as the Deputy Head of Law Enforcement. They asked her if it was stressful. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">When she found Harry's letter and confirmed with Robards that there was an enormous network of wizards taking Muggles and <em>using their life-force</em>, draining their bodies to keep wizards alive, or as slaves that would do things that was never desired from house-elves— she was beyond furious. When he said that Harry’d been on the task of gathering evidence and Harry hadn’t come back, that fury increased tenfold. She was furious at everything; furious that wizards had been taking Muggles because they were considered expendable; furious that it had taken so long to even suspect that anything was happening because Muggles were always swept beneath the rug; furious because now it had taken her friend. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Hermione was no longer a bushy-haired girl trying to champion a cause as clumsily as S.P.E.W. She had sharpened her vengeance to a honed point, and knew how to use it. It’d take time. But Harry was strong. She’d find him by uprooting this whole wretched thing out of the ground.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">She called the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures because it was where her strongest hold and networks lay. It was second largest department in the Ministry and divided into three sections. She knew the people there quite well, because she had worked there until last month and re-instated its Centaur Liaison Office by actually putting them on speaking terms with the Centaurs out past west London. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Hi,” she said, “can you put me through to Goblins? No, not tomorrow,” she said, and her voice filled with bristling magic that echoed out even over the line, “<em>now</em>.”</span>
</p><p class="p3"> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">There was an eruption of noise around Harry, cheering, and he shut his eyes tightly because it was bright. Knew we could do it, he heard, and opened his eyes again to see smiling faces all around. He didn’t recognise any of them. They were wearing interesting clothing— <em>Muggle</em> clothing. The light came from these big screens all around the room filled with lines and numbers and curves. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He tried to move and realised he couldn’t. “Welcome back to life, Mister Potter!” someone said. “We knew it’d work. You should give a big wet kiss to your human blood.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’m fucking tuckered. Talk about expensive hypotheses,” someone else said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Let’s get plastered."</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Dibs on the loo.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’d rather sleep.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No way, c’mon, I’ve got coffee liquor.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1"> He didn’t know what these things meant. “Where-“ Harry slurred. "Who...”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Who wants to do the honours?"</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">There were a wide array of Muggles, brown-haired and black-haired and blond-haired, fair and tan and dark, tall and short, accented and bespectacled and freckled. They looked messy-haired, with deep bags under their eyes. One of them said, “Well, Mister Potter, we were very lucky, because we were looking for you and then you fell straight into our lap.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I was…” Harry muttered, feeling like he was sifting through thick cloud, “I was looking for… I…”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Pardon us if we’re not the most sympathetic. Last year five hundred thousand people went missing and into your warm, wizarding arms. And this was in the UK alone.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“The Muggles,” Harry said. "They were trying to take the Muggles. I was… I was trying to catch them.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Oh <em>man</em>, the way wizards say that word make my skin crawl. Do you have any idea how you sound? Reminds me of my dad. He’s that kind of father figure whose fragile ego consists of being able to control his daughters and pet their hair when they’re <em>thirty</em>.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Val, we don’t need to hear your daddy issues. Can we wrap up?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah, okay. Well, Mister Potter, rest well. We’re gonna get wasted and then run tests on you tomorrow.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Wait,” Harry said. Things were starting to become clearer. “Please, I don’t understand. Someone… I don’t think Robards lied to me, but there was a trap, they must’ve caught me, was it the Cruciatus? I’ve never–” never been cursed by a spell that agonising– “-seen a spell like that. Why do you have me?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">One of the Muggles whistled. The noise was sharp, like a blade, a sliding note, and Harry clung onto the focus it brought him, reeling it in. “Shit. I’m betting theory number two was right. Isn’t he technically law enforcement? It’d make sense, since the second lot came afterwards.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We shot law enforcement?“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Half of us have been on our feet for the last fifty hours. Can’t we just phone this in?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We’ve gotta to make sure before we get our asses reamed.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No one’s going to do any any <em>reaming</em>. It was reasonable to assume that he was there for the trafficking — besides, no harm, no foul.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The one who’d said the last sentence stepped up towards him. Harry had to crane his head upwards. He was strapped to some sort of slab, upright, and was completely bare. “Okay. Let’s get your story straight. Why were you out on Chestnut Ave last week?“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It had been last week? He knew that this was supposed to be classified information, but this wasn’t exactly the Ministry, and Harry wasn’t in any sort of position to be withholding knowledge right now. “I was there to gather evidence that there was an illegal smuggling ring kidnapping Muggles.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">A chorus of <em>fucks!</em> and similar curses and groans went up from the Muggles. The man in front of Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “You weren’t there to <em>take</em> any homeless men?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“My boss told me not to do anything stupid,” Harry said. “I was just there to get evidence.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We found a camera on him, didn’t we?” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Bollocks.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“The situation is,” the man said, to Harry, “that we had that neighbourhood in lockdown and a sniper that shot and killed you.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry didn’t know how to process that.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“But we’ve been running a set of viral experiments here to see if we can bring people back to life— a derivative of your <em>Inferi</em> spell, if that’ll help you understand— and we weren’t going to stoop to <em>your</em> level. We’d been testing on dead bodies. At the same time, we were trying to catch the wizards kidnapping people they thought we wouldn’t notice. Shooting you was a mistake. We saw a magic user in the hit location at the projected kidnapping time and fired.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You’re the one taking the bodies,” Harry realised. A group of <em>Muggles?</em> Had taken <em>Dumbledore</em>? And <em>Grindelwald?</em></span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It slowly sunk in that the scale of this was incomprehensible. It wasn’t about taking Dumbledore. It was about Muggles being able to <em>bring back the dead</em>– being able to subvert Hogwarts’ wards, being able to–</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Hey, if we leave him like that, he’s going to get blood pooling in his toes.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“He’s in his prime. He's not gonna get a clot.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We can put him in to the yard or something more comfortable. We’re probably diplomatically obliged to, at this point.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We’ll move him,” the man said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Dumbledore!“ Harry yelled suddenly. The Muggles looked alarmed. “That means– he– he’s <em>alive?!</em> You brought him back to life?” At the epiphany, every limb in him felt weak. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No,” the man said. "Resurrecting only worked on two samples. It’s the human blood— we looked up the family trees. The wizards who’d had purely magic lineages dated back too far rejected the process.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Maybe it’d work if they'd died more recently.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“We don’t know that yet."</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Does anyone have his wand?"</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It’s next drawer. I’ll get it.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“One of them is me,” Harry said slowly, still clinging stubbornly to a thought. “Who was the other one it worked on?” Lupin? He was also a dead halfblood. He felt a fireburst of hope in his chest. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Here!” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The latches on his wrists came loose and Harry stumbled forwards. His head span. Someone put his wand into his hand and he felt as magic flowed through him like warm honey, twisting through him, like drinking a hot mug of tea on a cold day, and he couldn’t stop the sigh of relief. On reflex, he spelled himself the illusion of clothing since the nakedness was becoming quite uncomfortable.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Again, the Muggles around him burst into noise. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Thank fuck–”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’m gonna rub this in Alex's rodent face <em>so</em> hard–“ Again, their reactions puzzled Harry. They knew he was a wizard, so why were they surprised at his use of magic? </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The man in front of him was smiling, just slightly, and spoke even while the other Muggles were high-fiving and generally being rambunctious. “The other one suffered a side effect. Tom Riddle’s death wasn’t recent enough, unlike yours.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">No. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">They could <em>not</em> have brought <em>Tom Riddle</em> to life. Of all wizards– not him. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It shot Harry immediately back in that state of numbness, where words were being heard but he did not truly process them, like he was in a lucid yet heavy dream. “What do you mean?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“He didn’t wake up as a wizard. There wasn’t a single drop of magic left in him,” the man said, and then shrugged, as if it was no big deal. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Death by Water</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">There was a visible mark that he had died. The scar from the front was a puckered, sunken-in thing. Beneath it was a similar circle where the basilisk had bitten him. Harry’s body was already littered with scars, so the bullet wound wasn’t particularly out of place. He regarded it with a clinical sort of eye. His back was a different matter entirely. An enormous chunk of flesh there was raw and scarred over, spanning nearly a third of his back. It must’ve been where the it had come out the other side. He hadn’t known bullets were so destructive, but he’d never seen them fired in real life. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The high velocity round had gone <em>through</em> him. The thought was somewhat harrowing, but when he clenched his fists and found himself still vividly alive, he realised that it wasn’t anything worse than usual. There were no tremors, no fear, and somehow his mind was calm because the picture had come together. He’d been told over a hot cup of cocoa that Muggles had been looking for him because he fit all their criteria: recent non-magical heritage and powerful— so they must have taken his aunt and uncle into questioning and sparked Dudley’s hysteria. He didn’t think they’d planned on killing him at that point. They were just trying to monitor him since he was next on the list of powerful wizards. It made practical sense, too. It was unlikely that they’d manage to assassinate him without inflaming the entire Wizarding world. Then, since he’d stupidly performed magic out in the open with the phone in the very place that a homeless Muggle man was scheduled to be captured, they’d mistaken him for their mark. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Muggles were honing magic. They’d been ambiguous about how long it’d been occurring for, but the recent uptick and boldness in activity was a direct response to how wizards had been treating Muggles.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry frowned, looked at his scars, and then put his clothes back on and towelled his hair dry. He was in a small and bland set of living quarters. The Muggles had said that they were going to get blasted drunk and then talk to him more tomorrow about how to proceed. They were quite frank about how they’d initially planned to torture and perform all forms of inhumane tests on the wizard they captured, but since it was Harry Potter and that carried seriously inter-magic relation consequences — they knew a shocking amount of intelligence and what had happened in the last few years, too — and since there was enough doubt that he was not a part of the Muggle smuggling ring, they would treat him as a guest for now.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">They’d told him a lot of information. Harry doubted that he’d be allowed to leave the facility until the conflict blew over. He also knew that they’d handed over the information to keep him appeased, since they seemed too tired to deal with overt hostility. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Still, he tried the door to his quarters to check if he could leave. It opened into a fairly plain and windowless corridor. He decided to search the room before he went to explore and found that someone had left a set of scribbled instructions on the drawer by the bed. The elevator won’t work for you because we don’t want you to get lost. Will fetch you for breakfast tomorrow morning. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He wandered out, but the doors were unmarked, so he left a magical imprint on his door that he’d be able to use <em>Point Me</em> on to get him back and went to explore. Most rooms were just used for storage, he realised, and even when he opened some of the boxes to look inside, they seemed mostly to be filled with metal objects and machines and machine components, as well as folded up tables and stools and things like that. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The wandering continued for a long time, but he wasn’t worried about getting lost with the magical waypoint he’d initially set. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The appearance of a locked door was shocking. None of them had been so far and it did not appear outwardly any different to the rest. Grimly, he open it with barely a whisper word and then shoved it wide, wand held before him to reveal a set of quarters virtually identical to his own. Tom Riddle was on top of the bedsheets, a single bare leg propping up an open book, staring at him in naked shock. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry backed out. Then began legging it with a hurried stride that wasn’t quite a run. He was not ready to deal with the murderer of his parents now. Possibly ever. The door opened almost immediately behind him and he heard a shouted <em>stop.</em></span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He didn’t need to flee from Voldemort. To be afraid was to show weakness. He faltered, and took a very deep breath, and turned around; Tom Riddle was there, looking unlike Harry had ever seen him because he seemed around Harry’s age, mid-twenties, with a head full of hair and that same awful pretty face filled with stitched scars where his decomposing features must’ve been rebuilt, in nothing but a soft shirt and loose sleeping shorts. He was staring at Harry so intently that Harry felt it prickle all down his back. Harry tried not to look at his bare legs, and even the thought of them sent him into dizzying cognitive dissonance. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle approached, slowly, like one would approach a spooked animal. Harry’s hand tightened on his wand. Then Riddle’s hand lashed out like a striking viper, straight for Harry’s throat. Or tried to, at least, because Harry sent a spell that blasted him back and sent him staggering. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Did you think I lost my magic like you did?” Harry snapped, crackling with power. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle did not immediately respond. He said, rather bitterly, wiping his smoking hand, “I suppose you aren’t a hallucination.” His voice was not the serpentine hiss that Harry had grown accustomed to. It was uncanny. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry didn’t lower his wand yet.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Why <em>are</em> you here, then?” Yet, somehow, Riddle managed to sound as haughty as ever.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Why would a locked door have stopped me?” Harry said. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle scoffed. “I mean in this <em>place</em>, you fool.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It was an accident. Don’t they tell you anything?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle’s mutinous expression told him that perhaps it wasn’t that the Muggles weren’t telling him anything; it probably was that he was an unpleasant fucking person and even Muggles didn’t want to spend their time with a de-powered mass murderer that undoubtably had been nursing extended internal conflict ever since he was resurrected and took out as anger on everyone he was near.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry could not begin to describe how much he loathed that, of all wizards, Riddle was the one that they’d succeeded at. They hadn’t been able to make Dumbledore work, but Harry thought that maybe it was wasn’t due to blood, but because Dumbledore was content with being dead. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You’re different,” Harry said, in the uncomfortable silence, and it wasn’t so much an observation as a prompt to get Riddle talking. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“What made it apparent? Was the lack of red eyes?" Riddle sneered. “I’ve been reading fiction extensively—it offers a brilliant form of escapism. Antagonists are always red eyed. Was I your antagonist, Harry?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">His blasé attitude was equally, if not more, uncanny. “Call me Harry again and I'll call you <em>Tom</em>.” He didn’t like the sound of his name in Riddle’s mouth. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I couldn’t care less. You certainly won’t call me <em>Voldemort</em>. Voldemort was …<em>magical</em>.” Riddle looked into his quarters so that the light illuminated his face in profile, and had all the dramatics of his former self that suddenly Harry could see the ghost of his serpentine-humanoid form very clearly. His tone went soft like the lap of a snake tongue. “He was revered… feared. What I am now-”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Voldemort wasn’t revered, he was defeated,” Harry said flatly, and shattered the moment. He <em>saw</em> Riddle’s eyes narrow. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“And so he was,” Riddle said, silkily, and then strode back into his room with no further word and shut the door behind him very loudly, which Harry opened as he followed him in. When Riddle reached the foot of his bed he spoke with a tone of pure condescension. “Does a shut door mean nothing to you? I’d rather you leave. You’re nothing but an irritation.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry stood there for a moment, thinking. He really had no use for Riddle. “No, you’re right. I have nothing to do with you. I was just curious.” He hadn’t believed it until he saw it. He hadn’t really believed it until he’d seen Riddle helpless enough to get <em>hit</em> by his spell. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Of what?” Riddle’s lip curled. “My disgusting <em>Squib</em> status?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">But, still, there really was only one way to be sure. Riddle had a known weakness: a revolting amalgamation of ego and temper. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yeah,” Harry said, and felt a rising glee. He hadn’t been this spiteful in years. “You’re finally as weak and pathetic on the outside as you were on the inside.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle whirled around, expression completely unhinged. “You’ll regret saying that," he snarled. This was when Voldemort would’ve sent a Killing Curse, but Tom Riddle had no magic now, and all that happened was that his fists clenched uselessly at his sides.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It doesn’t look like they're keeping you here,“ Harry said. “It looks like you don’t want to <em>leave</em>. Poor, ugly Riddle has no place with the wizards because they hate him and he’s <em>weak</em>, but he still thinks himself too high and mighty to want to go live with <em>Muggles</em>. You’d slummed it with Muggles for at least sixteen years of your life. Really, I’d think you’d gotten used to it by now.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He half expected a curse. But instead Riddle was lunging, and Harry had a mouth of grinning teeth as he didn’t even bother using his wand; he squared up instead, settling his centre of mass lower and more balanced as Riddle barrelled into him, a whole entire body warm and surreally alive that Harry used as a counter-weight to swing them around, flip them over, and slam Riddle’s back against the floor. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">All the breath left Riddle's lungs in an instant. Harry pinned him down solidly. He said, “I bet you read about the Squib Right marches in 1970 in the news when they happened. Did you?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“When my magic returns, I’ll kill you,” Riddle said. His eyes were furious. “I’ll make you loathe <em>ever</em> living.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I learned about it in History. Those marches went to <em>hell</em> because a pureblood riot broke out and killed every one of those Squibs,” Harry said, and a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Maybe if your grandad didn’t hate Squibs so much, your mother—“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The rest of his words were lost in the nigh-inhuman sound that Riddle made. He bucked wildly, and Harry found himself surprisingly hard-pressed to keep him down. He’d done enough goading. He leaned down, right by Riddle’s ear, and said, full of heat, because for all that Riddle was pathetic now, he <em>deserved</em> to be. He’d shown that he was the type of person that made magic a horror rather than wonder; he was the type to abuse kindness when given it—and in all the years of his long life, had <em>never</em> learnt better.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Time to stop throwing tantrums and thinking those Squib marches were so stupid,” he said. </span>
</p><p class="p3"> </p>
<hr/><p class="p3"> </p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry was groggy on waking, because he hadn’t gotten enough sleep in quite a while, and Point Me hadn’t actually worked and only spun his wand endlessly in his palm — but he certainly wasn’t going to ask Riddle for directions — so he’d had to wander for a while until he found his bed. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">A Muggle came to fetch him for breakfast. It was the one that’d spoke to him mostly the day before; he was middle-aged, unmarried, and somehow both terse yet casual in a very devil-may-care attitude. His name was Adam. He showed Harry to the kitchen and told him to sit down while he fixed crumpets and coffee. The kitchen itself was plain, but there was food stocked inside, and it was absent of dust, so someone must’ve been using it regularly. “How was your rest?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It was alright,” Harry said, “better than some places I’ve slept.” He decided not to ask about the malfunction of Point Me, since he wasn’t sure if he trusted the Muggles. “Sorry to be a bit blunt, but am I going to have to stay here? I have friends who must be worried about me.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Yes, you will. At least for now,” Adam said, as he put the crumpets into the toaster. “We’ve arranged for negotiations with your minister tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to see how that goes.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You’re using me as a bargaining chip?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Not precisely. To be fair, I shouldn’t have called it a negotiation. Either your minister publicly announces the full extent of wizarding crimes against humanity and takes the guilty parties to trial in a human court, or we start pulling the trigger.” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No one would agree to that," Harry said. The uproar in the Wizarding world would be unthinkable. No one would agree to being trialled for crimes against <em>Muggles</em>, especially in a Muggle court. “You’d convict all of them just because they’re wizards.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam’s huff of air was derisive. “Even before this, do you know how many people died because of wizard whims?” Harry’s expression did not change. History did not condemn all of magical-kind. “How about this—did your ‘Dark’ wizards get trialled by their own people, or by the ones they’d wronged?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1"><em>That</em> made Harry think. And that made Harry pause. “Your intelligence is good,” he finally admitted, because he hadn’t realised that they knew so much about the Wizarding world.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The admission sat heavy on his tongue. Dark wizards had been trialled by the ones they’d wronged, and Harry had spoken honestly at their trials. That had been fair—Dark wizards like Peter Pettigrew, betraying his parents, lusting for power and fear — deserved to be judged. But now <em>Muggles</em> were the ones with dead parents. Now Harry was one of the Dark wizards. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Some part of Harry didn’t want to believe that the degree of crimes against Muggles warranted all this.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Your 'Squibs’ talk to us,” Adam said, and the crumpets popped out of the toaster. “The siblings and parents of Squibs talk to us.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He began to butter the crumpets. Harry thought about Dumbledore and his sister.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“So I’ll be experimented on if the Minister says no?” Harry said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“No,” Adam said. “We would love your cooperation, but we're not that stupid. As far as we can tell, you’re universally loved and already a martyr. Word right now is that you were taken by wizards.” Robards, Hermione, Ron— they must’ve thought that the ring got him. Harry had thought that too, at first. “If that’s putting <em>your</em> law enforcement on the tail of the underground, then we’re going to keep letting that happen. But we’re not going to let you out if you know what we plan to do and if you plan to fight us.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“When you say pull the trigger—” Harry said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“What do you think?” he said. “Exactly what it sounds like.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said nothing. He accepted the crumpets with quiet thanks, then said, “I’m not going to let you hurt anyone. If we’ve wronged Muggles, then it’s not going to be solved by more killing.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“<em>If?</em> Before we talk about <em>if</em>— what if I told you that we aren’t going to kill all of you, but start making you see our way?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You have no idea what magic means to a wizard,” Riddle said, from the doorway. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry’s head snapped up. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that Riddle needed to eat too and that his arrival was inevitable. His existence was surreal; Tom Riddle was in nothing but a soft white dress shirt that was rolled up at the sleeves and dark, pressed trousers. Harry’s mouth went dry and looked away and focused on his food. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I think I do,” Adam said. He didn’t seem surprised, like Harry did. “It means you think you’re powerful. It means that you think you’re <em>worth</em> more.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry thought that he saw, minutely, just how deeply that cut Riddle. “You took my <em>magic</em>,” he sneered. “You might as well have taken my life.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry began to think about what magic meant to him. How would he react if he woke up the next day without being able to even cast <em>lumos</em>? Harry thought how life had been before Hagrid had burst into his home, how life had been in his cupboard, how life had been once he’d gone to Hogwarts. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It’d been <em>stressful.</em> It had been colourful yet stressful and dangerous and for half of his time he’d <em>hated</em> it. He’d been forced to grow up earlier than he ever should have because of what Tom Riddle had done to him. He’d had to kill people. He’d had to lie, and thieve, and stand against the full scorn of the Wizarding world. He’d had to starve and he’d had to run. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">And then he thought about the aftermath. He met Hermione and Ron every Friday for drinks. He went to the bar on Saturdays to watch Quidditch games with coworkers. His old classmates still sent him letters every week. Even Dudley wrote to him. He kept a pot plant on his windowsill that Neville had sent him that had fully grown its own attitude. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It’d hurt, but Harry was more than his magic. He had the friends to catch him and the fulfilment of a lifetime. He didn’t need anymore. Perhaps he’d start an owl emporium and watch children who were going to Hogwarts for the first time burst in, full of excitement, and pick an owl to name it theirs for life. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">That was the problem with Riddle, Harry realised, as man walked in and opened the fridge with complete icy resolution to ignore the Muggle. Without his magic, Riddle was nothing. He was less than air. He had no passions. He had no friends. He had no hobbies. He had no fulfilment. His heart was empty because he’d let that lust and greed burn it through like a wildfire. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry found that he couldn't muster any pity. Adam offered him coffee. Harry took it. He thought back to the matter at hand. “So you want to take the magic away from wizards.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I’m sure we can perfect the concoction that worked on him,” Adam said, tipping his head towards Riddle, who did not react. “We’ll do it until we’re <em>acknowledged</em>. Why the long face? I thought you were a champion of justice.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I don’t think what you're doing is any better than violence,” Harry said. “Magic <em>is</em> a huge part of our lives. It’s a whole sense, like being able to hear. You want to <em>disable</em> and maim wizards to get your way.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam looked at him. He sighed, and put his mug down. “I figured you’d slip up sooner or later. ‘Disable’. You think ‘Muggles’ are less than wizards. To be like us is to be maimed.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said nothing. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He hadn’t meant that, but he'd said it, and so then he’d realised that maybe he <em>had</em> meant it, then. A cold feeling started in his gut. It was hard to swallow. Riddle was not the only person, he was beginning to realise, that was being forced to face unpleasant introspections. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“It’s unfathomable that you believe his drivel,” Riddle said. He had the stovetop on, and had cracked his egg into a pan that was sizzling away. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam took a seat at the table and leaned back, sipping at his coffee. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Of course Muggles are less than wizards,” Riddle said. “They can’t <em>kill</em> with nothing but the will to. They can’t raze a building with nothing but a word. They can’t <em>see</em> into minds. They are inferior beings in everything but number — and even that makes them nothing but <em>common</em>.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The pan’s sizzle was a scream. Harry had the feeling that his reply was being strongly scrutinised. He also had the feeling suddenly that he was quite detached from his body, because he was having some type of revelation. His own attitude towards Muggles and Dark wizards, Riddle’s attitude towards Muggles and Light wizards, and Adam’s attitude towards Dark and Light wizards was forming some sort of shape—and there was symmetry to it, one of parallel faces—and he couldn’t accept some truths about one without accepting truths about another by sheer geometry of transitivity. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said, “That’s what you said about non-Dark wizards too, and it ended with you dead at the other side of my wand.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“A fluke,” Riddle said coolly. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry’s temper rose in a flash. Calling it a fluke was disrespecting all the people who had died for him and all the people who had given it their all—the ones who, really, had been behind the destruction of Voldemort. “Do you want me to prove a <em>fluke</em> to you again?” Riddle simply met his eye, and then disregarded him, turning back to his cooking food. “I was always told that you were one of the smartest wizards to ever live, but the more I think about it, you’re incredibly stupid.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle appeared more composed than last night, because his only response was, “It is useless to play Runic Riddles with a Muggle. They will simply knock over your pieces and strut about as if they’d won.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said, “Denial’s an ugly look on you, Riddle.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Are you trying to convince me that a <em>runt</em> who can not even brew a potion defeated the one who brought the entire Wizarding world to its knees?”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I destroyed your diary. Dumbledore destroyed your ring. Ron destroyed your locket. Hermione destroyed your cup. I stabbed your diadem and Ron kicked it into Fiendfyre—“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I could care less for <em>semantics</em> or the tales of your fortunes.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“—Neville killed Nagini. You destroyed the piece of soul in me and then you killed <em>yourself</em> with your own killing curse. The house-elf that you thought too disgusting to fathom killed you. I didn’t kill you. You did! You set all these people on yourself because you threatened something that we <em>cared</em> about.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You were <em>fortunate</em>," Riddle said. “So many cosmic coincidences— and the power of the Elder Wand— were <em>temporarily</em> on your side.“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said, with a fair degree of condescension. “Riddle, I don’t know how long you were resurrected for, but <em>no one</em> noticed you were gone. No one even knew where you were buried. We asked <em>Lucius.</em> We asked your Little Death Eaters, but they’d run away from you once and they’ll run away from you again. No one knew and no one <em>cared</em> what the hell happened to you after death. It was Dumbledore who brought me here. And the only reason people were fast to forget you once you kicked the bucket was because you were hellbent on <em>running away from it</em>.“ </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Riddle did turn around, then, and his dark eyes were blazing. His scathing retort seemed to be on the tip of his tongue. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You’re going to burn your egg,” Adam said, mildly. Riddle looked down into his pan. Harry saw that the food was fine, but Riddle picked it up and dumped it into the disposal and shredded it with a shriek anyway. Perhaps he was just trying to prove a point, or perhaps he was accustomed to sulking, because then he tossed the pan into the sink with a clang and simply left the kitchen. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“You touched a nerve. He’s been here for five years,” Adam said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">The number left Harry stunned into silence. That was— they must’ve dug him up only a <em>year</em> after he’d died. And <em>no one</em> had noticed. The fact that the Wizarding world cared not a whit for Riddle really was real, then. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Consider this moral loophole,” Adam said, and got up to pour himself even more coffee from a steaming pitcher. “If we hurt wizards who were dead anyway, what was your government going to care? He was the perfect choice. All-loathed, all-powerful, and dead.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Had there been others before Riddle? “Death should be peace," Harry said.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam’s eyes flashed. Then he smiled at Harry, a little mockingly. “Then maybe we can only bring back the ones who’re wicked enough. You’re not very nice to him, you know. At least I broke the news to you gently.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“I know what you’re trying to do,” Harry said. “I can see it— I’m— I’m a part of <em>your</em> Voldemort. I’m your villain who doesn’t want to think that he’s done something wrong.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam stood there, leaning against the counter, smiling. “You proved in one conversation that you don’t care about us. We’re <em>disabled</em> wizards. We’re your cannon fodder.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry ran a hand through his hair, distressed. He thought about his own parents. “Did we hurt someone you cared about?“</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“Don’t be simple,” Adam said. “I don’t need a personal reason to want justice. But if that means anything to you, maybe you should ask Val. She had two sisters. One was a witch. She was in Gringotts the day the roof exploded because a dragon blew through it and got hit by rubble.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry’s chest went very tight. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“She didn’t die from that, if you’re worried. She went back the next day because Gringotts owed her insurance—a bit of the roof broke her wand, and so she was there when Voldemort came in and slew everyone because he was upset something had been stolen.“ He smiled at Harry. “Unlucky, wasn’t she?” </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said nothing. He'd seen the scene at the time, in his head. He was seeing it again: the result his and Riddle’s combined efforts.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>The Elder Wand slashed through the air and green light erupted through the room, the kneeling goblin rolled over, dead, the watching wizards scattered before him, terrified: Bellatrix and Lucius Malfoy threw others behind them in their race for the door, and again and again his wand fell, and those who were left were slain, all of them, for bringing him this news, for hearing about the golden cup —</em>
  </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">“The other sister’s somewhere dead in the basement of St. Mungo’s,” Adam said, in that same nonchalant tone that he used when he’d told Harry Tom Riddle had lost all his magic.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">One time, Harry had gotten kidnapped, stolen a Muggle car, and had a tire run out of air on the middle of the motorway 30 kilometres out from the nearest town. He didn’t have a wand, was being magically tracked so he couldn’t Apparate or send a signal, and needed to get back to Preston so he could contact someone from the Ministry. The rest of his team was still tied and drugged up and he’d been betrayed by a stupid <em>car</em> that wasn’t even his because he’d just robbed it from someone who’d left the engine running at a station. There was a spare tire in the boot but he no clue how to change it, so he’d sat on its hood and put his head in his hands and then realised he had to hitchhike or something else, so he stood by his car and stuck his hand out. He stood there for an hour, then for another two. The sun started setting. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">He’d stolen money from the petrol station too (he’d return it if he returned in one piece), so he was at the point of literally waving money, but every car blew past. His frustration had bordered tears watching people drive past because they simply <em>didn’t care</em> and because it simply wasn’t worth their time to help anybody. His Aurors were suffering; he was running on nothing, and no one <em>stopped</em>. He was starting to think that it would be too late. What use was humanity anyway when everyone was so shit?</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">It took four hours for someone to pull over by the side of the road in a small, ramshackle. The man had an entire family of five in tow. Harry saw the faces of little daughters up by the windows as father and wife went through the motions of getting their jack, lifting Harry’s car, removing the original with the tire iron and fitting the spare on. His relief was complete and utter, and he hadn’t even needed to lie at all, because they didn’t appear to speak much English so there was no need for small talk.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry tried to pay them when they were done and getting back into their car because he’d held them up for more than an hour. There were <em>children</em> in the back seat who must’ve been impatient and were squirming around, loudly playing games in a Muggle language he did not understand but that he suspected was Indian. But the father had refused any sort of money, and the wife had turned it down with very adamant hand-waving. They had fired something off rapidly to the eldest daughter, who’d then stuck her head out of the window and said, “They want to say that someday someone will need your help and that’s all you owe them.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">When Harry had sat back into the car, he’d had to wipe his eyes. Someone whose every moment was precious, who was so much worse off than he, had stopped for him without even knowing who he was or how desperately he’d needed them, and in that moment, it meant the world.</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>The night wet and windy, two children dressed as pumpkins waddling across the square, and the shop windows covered in paper spiders, all the tawdry Muggle trappings of a world in which they did not believe… And he was gliding along, that sense of purpose and power and rightness in him that he always knew on these occasions. Not anger… that was for weaker souls than he… but triumph, yes… He had waited for this, he had hoped for it…</em>
  </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>”Nice costume, mister!”</em>
  </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">
    <em>He saw the small boy’s smile falter as he ran near enough to see beneath the hood of the cloak, saw the fear cloud his painted face: then the child turned and ran away. Beneath the robe he fingered the handle of his wand. One simple movement and the child would never reach his mother, but unnecessary, quite unnecessary…</em>
  </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Adam said, “<em>I</em> haven’t tried to shove your failures down your throat every waking moment. In fact, I think we’ve treated you with enough courtesy. So if you don’t want to be ‘less than Muggles’, maybe you should hold off on the righteous ego.”</span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">Harry said nothing, but he thought, privately, that Adam was wrong. The way into Tom Riddle's mind was brute force. Riddle, when faced with unpleasant truths, like any animal, hissed and ran from the flood. </span>
</p><p class="p3">
  <span class="s1">But Harry was here. And Harry would hold his head under the water. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Quoted excerpts are from the Deathly Hallows.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>